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To See Your Face Again

L. R. McGary

    Philosophers have argued for centuries over where the soul is housed. The heart? The head? The whole? I knew them all to be wrong. It was the face.
    I knew the moment I saw Marco’s face again. It had been a year since he died, but the warmth that spread through me at his full lips, and straight nose, and delicate eyelashes was utterly familiar. Coming home.
    “Marco,” I breathed.
    “I’m not Marco,” said David, tired words. His voice shocked through me. Wrong, wrong! Deep and rumbling, and no music to my ears.
    “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Marco’s husband. I mean I was.” I hadn’t mixed up tenses in nearly a year.
    “Of course,” said David. “Russell.” We hadn’t seen each other since the day after Marco died. I had visited David in the hospital after the transplant surgery, desperate for something of Marco to still be real. Instead, I had found Marco’s face sewed onto David’s skull so grotesquely I had had to leave the room or be sick.
    I had vowed never to lay eyes on David again, but I was losing the memory of Marco’s face. I had plenty of photos, and some blurry videos, but none of them were quite real. A hurricane of hope and despair had led me at last to David’s door. Even if his face was still marred, nothing could be worse than that bloody mockery of my husband’s beautiful features in the hospital.
    And here he was, healed back into Marco. I could see every hair of his delicately arched eyebrows, every pore on his nose (someone needed a facial). David’s curling brown hair could easily be just another style Marco was trying. This was what I had been missing. What I had been losing.
    “Do you want to come in?” David cocked his head, Marco in that moment.
    “Yes,” I was answering before I could think, as I used to with Marco. He would quote back to me, “Yes...Well, actually...no, sorry.” That part, that private joke between us, I couldn’t bear to utter here, so I followed David inside. And I needed to keep looking at that face, so much better than photographs. I had forgotten that full texture of stubble, ready to be shaved off after a long day. I had thought I had Marco memorized beyond forgetting, but time is a stealthy thief.
    The design of David’s house was minimalist: white walls, angular shelves holding wire sculptures and empty vases, gray granite counters, and bright steal cabinet handles.
    Marco had loved cozy decor so much we nearly turned our apartment into a cottage. Every blanket was knitted or quilted. Every window was hung with braided garlic, or feathers, or pine branches “for the scent.” None of our chairs matched. When we had moved in together, he had insisted we keep all our mismatched things. “Loved in,” he had called them.
    “Can I offer you something to drink?” asked David.
    “Ch-water is fine.” Marco and I had had champagne with dinner like others had wine. That was all me, because every day with Marco had been one to celebrate. It had started as a joke, random Tuesdays with champagne because he wrote a good email, or I got that rock out of my shoe, and then it just became something we did. It was bittersweet to remember, but that was why I had come. To remember what I had been losing. And maybe to pretend it wasn’t lost.
    “I feel lucky every day,” said David, sliding me the water. “Thanks to Marco I can live as a man again. I can smile. I can speak. I can drink. It was too new at the hospital, too strange, but I’ve wanted to thank you, for him. He’s given me so much.”
    “I’m glad of it,” I said. “Some purpose to his death. Meaning.” Something beyond the awful senselessness of careless speed on wet roads. “That’s why I came today. Tomorrow, I’m holding a memorial, a remembrance of him, and I wondered if you might come. One year.”
    “Of course.” David was standing too solidly—Marco had always held himself like a dancer, but if I looked at just his face...the lips I had kissed each night, the eyebrows quirking just so, the wrinkles I had put by his eyes from smiling. I could drink in that face all night. It was worth any awkward conversation to remember how those features moved, to see it real and here. My heart ached with not touching him, but seeing that face could be enough. It was enough.
    “People stop me all the time to tell me about Marco,” continued David. We lived only two towns away, so it was inevitable some people would recognize him.
    “Everybody loved him,” agreed a voice from behind us.
    “Hey, honey.” Marco’s face lit up as it should for me, but David was looking past me. Still, I basked in that light, so long gone from my life. It was so right. So wonderful.
    A woman walked to David and kissed him. Kissed Marco’s lips.
    I spiraled back to when, after a year of flirting friendship, I had told Marco I liked him.
    “I have a girlfriend,” he’d said.
    I had never met her, never suspected, never imagined. I was such a fool to be crushed, and he had played me, he must’ve known. Betrayal and anger had torn me, and I had retreated from him to hide my hurt.
    A month later he had been at my door.
    “We broke up,” he’d said, and then he’d kissed me.
    He had never kissed anyone else in front of me. Not even when we were friends. Not even drunk. Not even as a joke.
    Marco’s face was kissing this woman. Marco’s lips.
    “Are you alright?” asked the woman. They must’ve stopped kissing, so why was I still seeing it?
    “I’ve just remembered I’m supposed to be somewhere else,” I said. Anywhere else.
    I ran from that sterile house, drove blindly.
    I had thought nothing could be worse than Marco’s swollen, mangled face stitched onto another man, but Marco’s lips...how dare he. How dare he?!
    I pulled over. I couldn’t die in a crash like Marco.
    I took out his picture, worn and worn by looking, but the memory of flesh was far stronger. I had wanted to replace the photographs with solid reality, and I had succeeded. Every time I blinked I saw his lips kissing that woman. Kissing that woman.
    I realized, staring at Marco’s photograph, that David’s eyes had been still his own—lighter brown than Marco’s.
    If soul was housed in memory, I was losing Marco’s.

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